💡The 5 AI Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025

From ‘AI like WiFi’ to the rise of the ‘AI Class,’ here’s what’s coming — and how to stay ahead of the curve.

1. 🧠 The Big Idea: How AI will impact your work and life in the next year.
2. 🔧 What To Do Next: Prepare for the 5®️ AI Predictions for 2025.

3. 📖 Time Investment: 6 Minutes.

4. 🏆 Goal: Help you see around the corner so you can prepare a personal AI strategy.

5. 📈 Topics: AI | Professional Success | Becoming Future-Ready.

AI seems to have gone through the familiar hype cycle from “What?” to “So What?” in the past 24 months. Rather than debating whether that’s warranted, let’s focus instead on the next phase we’re entering: Now what?

My goal is to prepare you for what’s coming. While others can make grand predictions about what this technology will do in the coming decade, I’ll focus today on what will happen in the next year and what it means for you.

In “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway memorably described how people go bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.” The same can be said about AI and society. The last two years marked the gradual phase of AI adoption. In 2025, we will feel its sudden impact on our lives and work. Buckle up.

🚨 The Big Idea

I know what some of you are thinking: AI is a solution in search of a problem. For many, applications like Chat GPT and Google Gemini are still novelties rather than meaningful tools. That will change in the coming year; what’s more, the systematic and skillful use of this technology will soon become essential to our continued professional relevance.

It took some time for people to figure out how to use every major 21st-century technology—from the PC and iPod to the Internet and mobile phone—in their work and lives.

Here are five predictions for how AI will impact you in 2025.

© IoNTELLIGENCE 2024

🔧 What To Do Next: The 5®️ AI Predictions for 2025

1. AI will be like WiFi: ambient, invisible, but everywhere.

I coined this phrase seven years ago for a talk I gave on megatrends, and this is the year that it comes true. The major AI players (Open AI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Perplexity) are in an arms race to colonize mindshare and market share, so they will continue to roll out updates, features, and new capabilities. By hook or by crook, they will throw use cases at consumers until a few of them stick.

Simultaneously, the enterprise players (Microsoft and Salesforce) are rolling out AI into everything, and this year will see the expansion of Agentic AI (AI bots working autonomously on your behalf) into your office environment and personal workflow. Finally, AI will continue to be integrated into consumer services that might not scream the need for it (Spotify is using AI to create personalized playlists based on prompts like “an indie folk playlist to give my brain a big warm hug,” an actual prompt they advertised!) and many that will benefit from that functionality.

Goldman Sachs expects $1 trillion (you read that right) in generative AI investments in the coming years, and all that money will inevitably lead to ubiquity. AI will be everywhere, in everything, in 2025.

2. People will crave signals of humanity and authenticity in an AI-dominated mediascape.

AI is taking over our content feeds. Much of what you already read on X or LinkedIn today is AI-assisted, if not machine-generated, with minimal human involvement. Soon, AI-produced video will crowd your TikTok and YouTube queues. This trend will only accelerate, but with interesting consequences.

In a world overflowing with synthetic content, people will put a premium on clearly human communication. That’s why figures with outsized personalities are starting to dominate the culture right now: unique voices stand out in a sea of sameness. AI-produced content is often competent but rarely compelling. What it often lacks is verve, spice, and opinion. You can always spot an AI-written article by its flat affect; soon, I predict, people will seek out bold positions and expressions of personality as “human” proofs of life.

In the coming Singularity era, we will all have to embrace — and advertise — what makes us singular.

3. The “AI Class” will rise.

Not everyone actively uses AI in their jobs right now. But those who do will get promoted, have more job security, and command higher salaries. This will start to become real in 2025.

It’s not just employers who will want you to have AI skills; it will also be clients. As a consumer of medical services, for example, I’d like my doctor to use AI alongside her expertise and experience, and soon, I will insist on it.

Training your team- and yourself- to use AI will no longer be optional; it will become mission-critical. We all need to boost our AI literacy now.

4. Forget Filter Bubbles and media fragmentation. We will live in AI-curated personal information silos.

Since the emergence of the Facebook news feed, we’ve lived in algorithmically-engineered filter bubbles for almost two decades now. More recently, the Trump era has supercharged the division of the media landscape into left and right-leaning ecosystems. This year, we saw the emergence of large but niche audiences arrayed around podcasts like Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper. These are all stops along the way to total media fragmentation: by the end of next year, many of us will live in hyper-personalized, AI-powered information silos.

Imagine Apple News supercharged by AI or TikTok-level personalization for all your content across all media. You won’t “go” to the New York Times website or the Bleacher Report app (two of my faves) anymore; algorithmically-selected articles, audio and video will come to you via an AI-mediated interface that learns your interests, scours the web on your behalf, and delivers it to your device. And all of it will be served to a single person: you.

The evaporation of commonly accepted truths has already had dire consequences for our politics and sense of community. But imagine a world where even Fox News or MSNBC can’t aggregate like-minded audiences because everyone will have their own tailored media stream curated by AI agents. “News you can choose” will have a whole new meaning, and we will have fewer collective narratives than ever before.

5. AI will seriously impact human relationships: “Her” is almost here.

Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi movie “ Her “ describes a world in which a lonely man falls in love with his Scarlett Johanssen-voiced AI. A decade ago, that story seemed farfetched. Today, it seems prescient.

Kevin Roose recently chronicled the heartbreaking news that a 12-year-old boy killed himself after falling in love with an AI chatbot. This is a canary-in-a-coal-mine-moment: while hopefully, no one will suffer such a tragic loss, we will know people in our circle who form parasocial relationships with AI characters in the coming year.

Have you ever lost your temper with your Google or Alexa when it doesn’t hear you correctly? I have. I bet others can catch feelings for a bot if I get cranky with a talking beer can.

We were always going to anthropomorphize AI. Our sense of connection to them and dependence on them will only deepen. Their ability to simulate humaneness without being one is a feature, not a bug: We can get all the benefits of well-simulated sympathy without being judged by a fellow person. Moreover, the fact that AIs don’t feel emotions themselves makes them particularly effective at projecting empathy; after all, our feelings often get in the way of properly listening and consoling someone during a crisis.

Combining the growing availability of AI chatbots using voice interfaces with a growing loneliness crisis, one can see how easily people will form intimate attachments. The Replika app already has 10 million users, and dozens of similar offerings are coming online. Lest you think this is only a male phenomenon, some futurists have predicted that AI boyfriends will be more popular than AI girlfriends.

🏆 Key Takeaways

The IoNTELLIGENCE 5®️ Predictions for 2025: AI will be like WiFi. People will crave signals of humanity and authenticity. An “AI Class” will rise. We will live in AI-engineered personal information silos. AI will seriously impact human relationships: “Her” is almost here.

IoNTELLIGENCE by Ion Valis draws on science and strategy to help busy people achieve professional success, personal transformation, and lasting happiness in five minutes a week.

I’m a strategic advisor and performance coach to entrepreneurs and executives. To learn more about my work, visit my website and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Originally published at https://iontelligence.substack.com.